Opinion

Is time running out for tape?

There are four good reasons to move away from tape backup, says Andy Syrewicze, Microsoft MVP and Technical Evangelist at Altaro Software

Comment

Welcome to the August edition of the Storage magazine eNewsletter. I have spent an unhealthy chunk of the Summer upgrading my home office setup, and having finally made the step up to Windows 10 I decided it was also time to ‘practice what I preach’ in terms of data protection, and implement a half-decent (albeit small-scale) backup process. The first step was to look at the breadth of data currently stored in various locations and decide some priorities: what could I simply not afford to lose, what was important but ‘not the end of the world’, and what was I storing for no very good reason?

This proved an illuminating exercise as I realised just how much data I was keeping - in some cases for ten years or longer - that I almost certainly would never need to access again. With my ‘better safe than sorry’ hat on, I duly archived enough work and personal files to almost fill a 160GB external SSD, and then set about creating regular backups (daily to external HDD, weekly to cloud) for the data that remained. Have I done enough? Time will tell!

David Tyler, Editor david.tyler@btc.co.uk